I’ve been in the process of drafting some articles on our house hunting adventures, but I am going save those for another day now as we have just gone into contract for a house.

Since the site is called California FIRE I am hoping no one will be too shocked when I say we’re purchasing our “new” home for $600,000.

Our soon to be home

We’ve actually been searching for about 8 months and we’re approved for a mortgage with a purchase price of $1.6 Million! That’s just insane, but there are lots of houses selling near where we work for over a million each (I blame Apple and Google, but mostly Apple).

We’re pretty excited as we think this is a pretty good deal based on market we are in and it meets our needs without being way more house than we need.

Rent vs. Buy

Let’s take a quick second to talk about rent vs. buy. This is common debate in the financial independence community it seems. Where are last home was located and now where we are moving too buying makes a lot more sense financially I think. Home prices are expensive, but so is rent. For a similar size house with the same amount of land we’d be looking at about $4,500 a month in rent (about $1,500 more than our PITI payments will be, though we are putting $120,000 down).

Pets – The Real Reason We Need a House

However, the real reason we are buying is because we got really lucky with our current small apartment. Our rent is modest for the area we live in and our landlord basically leaves us alone and has allowed us to keep 4 birds, 2 cats, and now a dog. Trying to find a new place to rent that will allow us to keep all these animal is pretty much impossible. To us our pets are family.

Projects

Everything looks like it is going to be a pretty smooth sale and we’ll be able to move in early next month. I’ve been mapping out a list of projects I want to start working on which I think should be a lot of fun and will improve my DIY skills or “talent stack” as mentioned by Jonathon and Brad at ChooseFI in reference to Scott Adams.

• Build a chicken coop for the hens Lady Kit wants
• Dog Run for Ansel (our German shepherd mix)
• Build some planter boxes to start gardening (thinking herbs a few vegetables to start)
• Setup a gray water system (at least from the washing machine, maybe showers as well depending on difficulty)
• Monitor power usage (For evaluating costs of installing solar and battery backup)
• Finish some sewing projects that I started a couple years ago (LARPing is a thing)

If anyone has any recommendations for things to be aware while going through the home purchase process, I’d love to hear them.